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...you mean when we had to actually write code to do everything we can accomplish today with a few mouse/tablet moves/clicks using pre-made meshes, texture maps, and light sources on a desktop PC (or even a notebook) instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

The first floppies, as I recall, were 180KB - I had to buy a couple from the University computer lab when I took a course on Pascal. They were at least more reliable than the cassettes on my own machine. Edit: on reflection, they were at least 5.25" discs so they may have been 360KB - I think I was able to reformat them and use them on my first real PC five years later.

.... instead of a huge mainframe buried in the bowels of some university campus math and sciences research centre.

...ahh, those were heady days.

the days when PCs didn't have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

I remember them well :coolsmile:

DOS. that was new fangled, our first computer had basic, and had to be coupled up to a TV and a casette recorder to work.
Yep! mine too! And when he noticed how much fun I had rewriting a bit larger programs for my small computer, well, it was a VIC20 actually.... , my husband took interest in programming and ended up as the IT man in his work! :)

Well, I have to say, when you want to do things on a computer it's a bit easier these days. :lol:

I remember those days..starting out on an Atari 400, upgrading to an Amiga, then finally one day upgrading to a 'puter that actually had a monitor and the keyboard wasn't attached- the elite IBM x386. My life was doomed to being behind a keyboard since the day I first played Sid Meyer's Civilization on that beast, and was wiped out by barbarians. I swore I would not rest until I got revenge.
The barbarians won. Someday, though..someday....

DOS. that was new fangled, our first computer had basic, and had to be coupled up to a TV and a casette recorder to work.

...we had one of the the old Apple ][ s with the external single sided HDDs almost as big as a shoebox.

To connect to the usenet at the local college campus we needed an acoustic handset modem (thus tying up the phone) which had a "ripping" 600 baud transfer rate.

At the college where I first took courses in that "mystical" subject known as "CS", We still used teletype terminals, punched tape. and punched cards. Only the SYSOP was privileged enough to have one of those fancy (monochrome) CRT terminals. You know those refrigerator sized tape drives you see in all old the SciFi films and television programmmes? I've loaded tapes on those.

Oh, you kids and your hippity-hoppity music. I remember when making an image actually meant using this flimsy stuff called... uhm... oh, right! Paper.
...I used to do that until Arthritis decided to take up residence in all my joints. I used to not only draw and paint, but lay my own paper,, stretch my own canvas, and even mix my own pigments.

If I were still into programming (and up on the latest lingos) I'd probably be scripting my own morphs if not writing my own software.

the days when PCs didn't have a hard drive and everything was stored on 740 Kb floppy disks
and there was no Windows UI, just DOS

Some of us are pre-DOS ;)

My first computer was a ZX-81, with 1K RAM and (often only theoretically!) the ability to use a tape recorder for storage. Though by then I'd already used an Ohio Superboard and a Research Machines 380Z at school.

The first year of my degree course was done with batch-processed punched cards on an ICL 1906 mainframe that only worked intermittently in the summer (soldered joints cracked every time it got too warm).

And to totally wow people's minds, a friend's first job on joining the company we worked for was wiring RAM - not wiring RAM chips together, wiring RAM bit by single bit from transistors.

My first job after leaving school I was operating a National ledger posting machine, that fed stuff on to this punched tape, which was taken once a week to the big IBM place to be processed. Once I got to visit the IBM place....them wasn't the sort of pooters you could have had at home.

The first computer I ever got to play with when I was about 8 was an atari 400, I remember Tandy and the COCO2 and can remember having to use game code books to program in the games you wanted to play... I remember playing my first ever 3d game... Dungeons of Dagorath... was all wireframe graphics... but was 3d and actually had 1st person view... lmao

I learned programing in Highschool on a Unisys Icon system and I remember the big stir when the 286 came along... The year I started college, they'd just upgraded to the (then) state-of-the-art 386's and win 3.1

*Edit* it was a huge and I mean HUGE deal when windows switched from being a dos promptt operation to a full fledged interface...

I remember in highschool in 90's, one of my friends said that she couldn't live without spellcheck. I was wondering how she could spellcheck with DOS. Everyone was using their new PC's while i was still using our Tandy EX1000. It wasn't until 96 when we finally got windows 95.

Our first computer was a Kaypro. I was 4. I played space invaders on it. Later we had one of those TI consoles that you could put game cartridges into and play Moon Patrol and TI Invaders, which was like space invaders but with color. There was also Hunt the Wumpus, but I think it was technically impossible to win that game.

I did my first word processing on some knockoff IBM thing with a black screen and green text. We were ecstatic when we saw our first Windows 3.1 machine handed down by my uncle. From there we pretty much graduated through OSs like everyone else. I didn't have real internet access until college.

I came to Poser/DAZ late, though - all the way into the XP era,when V4 was just coming out. :D I did my first full new build from parts in hopes of being able to play TES IV: Oblivion on it. I did, but ouch the load times. Skyrim is much more efficient on any system I've played it on.

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let's not talk about erasing there either.

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let's not talk about erasing there either.

Not to mention the terrible font selection. It could take YEARS to install another one.

My first 'puter was an IBM 7094 Mod II at Purdue - I worked second shift weekends hanging tapes and doing some Fortran programming on the side.

I held out until the IBM PC came out - and those first gen 5.25 inch floppy drives were single-side, 160 KB. And cost $540 each. And the 300 baud Smartmodem, with a hack that let you run it at 450 baud . . .

I just got the monochrome screen - the color graphics just wasn't all that good early on. Played Colossal Cave (aka Dungeon) and Zork (1 and 2) on it, used it for writing mostly - and some programming. Picked up a used Atari 800 XL for game play and then didn't play that many games - Age of Adventure and Wizard's Crown, for the most part. Seems that even then, on systems of that age, my eye-hand co-ordination sucked! :red:

And I've been on the upgrade treadmill ever since - dual-sided half-height floppy drives, dual-sided half-height quad density floppy drives, 30 MB hard drive, faster modems, more memory, change to an XT, upgrade to a 386, bigger svga monitor, bigger hard drives, windows, ran a one-line BBS for a couple of years, faster system, more memory, bigger hard drives - and still bigger hard drives - and yet again larger hard drives (did I say anything about even larger hard drives?). There was a brief side-trip through OS/2 and then back on the MS-Windows treadmill.

Professionally, much the same thing - IBM to Burroughs to Honeywell to IBM and then IBM - 360-DOS to MCP-V to GCOS-3 to MVS (and the upgrade treadmill - 4381-II MVS to MVS-XA to a 3090-J and then a 9672-R2 and MVS-ESA, then IBM SP-Frames running AIX) with side trips trough Raytheon PTS-1200 key-to-disk and Honeywell DPS-6 running GCOS-6 (almost exactly 100% not quite UNIX); dial-up lines to leased lines to statistical multiplexers and X.25 packet-switching, SNA, and finally TCP/IP on high-speed leased lines.

And now that I've retired I look back at all that and wonder - just what was so bad about pointed sticks and clay slabs? :-)

I first learned to program (on punch cards, of course) in High School in the 70's on an IBM 1130, which was obsolete before I was born -- the school got it in the late 50's when Sputnik scared the US into upping math and science funding in schools.

Our first home computer was a Franklin Ace -- my brother chose it because it was upgradeable: 2K of RAM, but it had enough slots for 8K. The tape-recorder cassettes they used typically had two copies of each program, as the error rate was awfully high. And you had to listen to it for the sound later popularized by modems to know when to plug it into the computer.

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let's not talk about erasing there either.

Not to mention the terrible font selection. It could take YEARS to install another one.

And some were almost unreadable, particularly the fonts Scrawl and Henscratch.

You scare me with these oldthink ideas. *shudder* Handwriting. That painfully slow way of expressing my thoughts. With limited editing capabilities. Poor cut-paste, and let's not talk about erasing there either.
...with my arthritis, my handwriting has become about as legible as a physician's prescription note for the pharmacist.

The first "productivity" oriented computer I actually "owned" was an old 12 mHz 80286 with 4MB RAM a 20MB HDD (that took up a good part of the case interior), a DD/DS 5.75" floppy drive, MSDOS 4.01, and an Amber screen Monochrome monitor (20 MB, how would I ever fill that?). I usually used it for WordPerfect 5.5 and Lotus 1-2-3 as well as connecting to various local BBS's.with an old Intel 144/144e Smartmodem (which I still have in a box somewhere).